Preface
Having written a book on rock music and a book on jazz music, and being in the process of writing a book on the classical music of the 20th century, i felt the need to put somewhere the many musical genres and movements that do not quite fit either of these categories. I also felt that i needed to research the beginning of the industry of popular music in Western Europe and the USA in order to better understand the dynamics of the industry of jazz and rock music. I also felt that ethnic music has become so pervasive that one should trace its parallel development next to Western European and USA musical genres. This book aims at filling all these gaps. I did my best to give it an organic feeling, although it is obvious that musicians from such diverse regions of the world had very little in common. Only after the synthesis of the 1970s can we talk of a global history of popular music. This book is about the foundations of that synthesis.
It was not terribly difficult to decide how to separate jazz music from pop music. It was much more difficult to decide how to separate rock music from the rest of popular music, because rock music has absorbed just about everything. Bits and pieces of this book were originally written for my 2003 book on rock music. The borderline is really more temporal than stylistic. Anything that happened after the 1960s is or will be in the book on rock music. Thus reggae and salsa are not in this book, nor is country music of the 1970s. The idea is that you should read this book first, then the history of jazz music and the history of rock music.
piero scaruffi, january 2007